Danny Routhier, co-host of 106.7 The Fan’s “Grant & Danny” show, has had enough.
“Open the school!” Routhier shouted into the microphone on Monday, April 6, which was yet another day of no school for the students of Fairfax County Public Schools. That Monday of no school for a “teacher’s workday” came directly after a full week of no school for spring break and before yet another day of no school that Friday, for a school planning day.
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“Where can I help you people?” Routhier asked. “I want to help this movement. The tired, irritated parents … We can fight it until there is no more fight left. Until they go to school five days a week twice in one month. Then we’ll take our next victory. We’ll keep climbing up that mountain until the children go to school … sometimes.”
Routhier is an entertainer, so he is exaggerating a little here, but any parent of a Fairfax County student is just as fed up with the public school schedule as he is. All told, Fairfax County has the longest school year, the shortest summer vacation, the highest number of days off, and the lowest percentage of five-day weeks in the entire nation.
It wasn’t always this way. As the parent of a child who attended Fairfax County Schools all the way from kindergarten through high school graduation, and two more children currently following the same path, I can vividly remember way back before 2020, when the schools still opened after Labor Day instead of two weeks before Labor Day, and five-day school weeks were the norm.
That was before Democrats in Richmond allowed government employees to collectively bargain, and FCPS signed its first-ever union contract with the Fairfax Education Unions. Since then, the number of early release days has risen from three to 12, the number of teacher workdays from six to nine, and the number of cultural holidays has gone from essentially zero (if you don’t count Easter/spring break and Christmas/winter as cultural holidays) to six. Those new cultural holidays, all added in the interests of diversity, include: Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Diwali, Orthodox Good Friday, Eid al-Fitr, and the Lunar New Year.
It is because of all these teacher work days and diversity holidays that FCPS has the lowest percentage of five-day school weeks in the nation. And parents have every right to be mad. Not only is it difficult finding adequate child care for all of these days off, but research shows that students, especially younger, learn better through routine and consistency. When every day is a half day or day off, there is no consistency.
Responding to negative parent feedback, the Democrats in charge of FCPS are proposing to take away two existing holidays: Veterans Day and Indigenous Peoples’ Day (formerly known as Columbus Day). Removing these two days off will help restore some routine to the FCPS schedule a little, but these are two holidays many parents already have off. This proposal does not address the fact that the vast majority of parents will still be left scrambling to find a place for the children on Eid, Diwali, and the Lunar New Year.
Since at least President Barack Obama, Democrats have been telling us that “diversity is our strength.” If that statement was ever true, it was because all immigrants coming to the United States knew they were expected to, and did, assimilate into America’s functionally Christian culture. If they wanted to take extra holidays off from school, that was fine, but they did not insist on adding their own cultural observances to the academic calendar in the same way Christmas/winter and Easter/spring break were.
There are literally thousands of religions in the world, each with their own holy days. It is folly to think we can honor them all with time off from school and still find time to teach children to read and write. In Fairfax County, the most endangered tradition may now be the full week of school.
